“Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”

—H.P. Lovecraft, “Beyond The Wall of Sleep”

Maybe it was the “night gaunts” who terrorized his childhood dreams or his father’s psychosis and hospitalization in Rhode Island’s Butler Hospital when the younger Lovecraft was only three (the cause was actually syphilis) that inspired him. Whatever the reason, Good ol’ HP—Howard Phillips Lovecraft—believer in cosmic horror with his human-nullifying entities, magical rites and forbidden lore, churned out reams of darkness. He’s been called the E.A. Poe of the 20th Century. For those unfamiliar with the Lovecraftean abyss, we offer up a playful primer (just darling) as an introduction to his vision and a lovely list of his works from which to pick and choose.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”